A Future with Hope
Jeremiah 29:11
The writer of the book of Jeremiah offers a vision for the hopefulness of a people experiencing exile in a strange city. Here the Israelites were in Babylon – alienated from their land, alienated from their God, and alienated – many of them - from their loved ones.
We can imagine that the Israelites here experienced what some philosophers have come to refer to as a certain nihilism – where a certain nothingness, meaninglessness, lovelessness, and hopelessness comes to define the existence of a people. It is against this backdrop of nihilism that Jeremiah writes these words of hope.
“For surely, I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare (shalom,
wholeness), and not for your harm, plans to give you a future with hope.”
Certainly hope could have been a fleeting – abstract - concept in times like those in which Jeremiah wrote. Those were the same times that would lead Jeremiah earlier to offer provocative questions to the same people –
“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healing there? Why then has the health of my
people not been restored? “
These were the same times and conditions that would lead the psalmist to write other familiar words of a people in exile –
“By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat and we wept when we remembered Zion. And
our captors asked us to sing to them the songs of Zion… How can we sing the Lord’s song in
a strange land?”
Perhaps the context in which Jeremiah wrote is not much dissimilar from that of our days. In many ways hope today seems fleeting - with political unrest, social disarray, family distress, and economic uncertainty.
I would suggest that Jeremiah’s words of hope here offer us today an important backdrop for thinking about where we are as communities, the church, and as an institution - and also where we’ve been and where we may be going.
Two weeks ago, I was honored to have been invited to give a lecture here during our Open House dealing with the matter of the church and race relations over the past forty years, and whether it is possible - or even desirable - for us to strive to become color-blind. In my reflections, I recalled some of what was occurring in America in the late 1960’s. It was a time of great racial tension. In 1968, the Kerner Commission Report, which President Lyndon B. Johnson had requested in light of the riots that had broken out in several cities across the country, summarized the state of race relations by noting that “America is a nation of two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.”
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 spawned a proliferation of violence in cities across the nation. In cities like Detroit, Washington, DC and Baltimore, in the aftermath of King’s death, we witnessed communities turn upon themselves in acts of violence and destruction. The images of large business corridors, residential communities and places of worship being looted and burned are still vivid in many of our memories.
However, these images of violence are to be viewed against the backdrop of a growing spirit of ecumenism and cooperation among religious communities throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. Developments which emerged as a result of the Second Vatican Council, as well as the development of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, along with other ecumenical and interfaith bodies, led to a growing understanding among faith communities as to the role of religion in facilitating dialogue and collaboration across and within the various forms of diversity that had theretofore served as points of division and disagreement.
The founding of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology in Baltimore serves as one shining example of such collaboration, where in 1968, St. Mary’s Seminary and University initiated this program of graduate theological education for laity and clergy from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish traditions. From its inception, the Ecumenical Institute has cultivated an environment of cross-racial, cross-cultural and cross-denominational discourse. Today, 40 years after its founding, the Ecumenical Institute of Theology continues to function in this spirit.
And today, given the growing change and diversity that is a part of the social and religious landscape, even as in 1968, there remains a critical need for institutions which offer a context for the convergence of cultures and ideas.
A few years ago, an interesting exercise was developed which offered a glimpse of our contemporary world, and the diversity that now shapes our existence. The exercise is entitled A Village of 100 People, and points out that if we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
· The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from
the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
· 51 would be male, and 49 would be female
· 82 would be non-white, 18 white
· 67 would be non-Christian, 33 would be Christian
Of 67 non-Christians, 20 would be Muslims, 13 would be Hindus, 6 would be Buddhists, 2 would be atheists, 12 would be non-religious, and the remaining 14 would be members of other religions
· 80 would live in substandard housing
· 67 would be unable to read
· 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
· 33 would be without access to a safe water supply
· 5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
· 33 would be receiving - and attempting to live on – only 3% of the income of “the village”
· 27 villagers would be under 15 years of age, and 7 would be over 64 years old.
By the end of a year, one villager would die and two new villagers would be born so thus the population would climb to 101.
In the courses that I teach, I often ask students to pause to look around their classroom, and observe the makeup of their classes in terms of race and ethnicity, as well as gender and theological diversity. Then I ask the students to imagine what our class may have looked like 40 years ago. It invariably becomes clear that the diversity of our classes today was not reflected in the classes of generations past.
In the summer of 2006, I had the privilege of leading a study group of 22 scholars from Wesley Theological Seminary in a doctoral immersion course that retraced many of the steps of the Civil Rights movement across Alabama. Our group reflected much of the diversity of the church and society. We were Hispanic, Native American, Caribbean, white and black, female and male, Baptist, Episcopalian, African Methodist Episcopal and United Methodist. In the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, we prayed, sang, and shared our thoughts together as we traveled. Dr. Eileen Guenther, a professor at Wesley Seminary and a part of our study group, offered that it was a spiritual sung by many choirs, “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” that played in her head throughout this experience (see The American Organist, November 2008).
Dr. Guenther says that she thought about the variety of tables that we encountered as we traveled through Alabama and how these were hopeful signs for her:
· Lunch counters of restaurants where all had not been welcome (in the past);
· The dining room table in the parsonage of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery,
where we were told, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed;
· The kitchen table of the same parsonage where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. searched his
soul and felt God telling him to press on with his work;
· The tables at which the people at 16th Street Baptist Church served us lunch, tables placed
adjacent to the site of the tragic bombing in September 1963 that killed four young girls;
· The tables around which members of our group gathered to share stories as victims of
discrimination, of their courageous work in the Civil Rights movement (and other
freedom movements), and their lament over a lack of awareness of what was going on at
that time in our country’s history.
I sense that our experiences in Alabama are emblematic of the blessings and burdens facing the churches today. To talk about the contemporary church is to talk about Christianity that is being lived out in a post-Christian, postmodern context. This means that many of the assumptions about God, Christ and the church that may have shaped a collective understanding of faith communities in the past, can no longer be made in the same ways.
In light of declines across much of the church over the past 40 years, a primary theological task of today’s church is to be self-critical as it pertains to issues such as the proliferation of the prosperity gospel, the lack of activism in many circles, and the inability or unwillingness of the churches today to speak prophetically on matters of contemporary concern such as the war in Iraq, the widening gap between the rich and the poor in America and around the world, the ongoing proliferation of racial bigotry, and the marginalization of others in our society, along with the generally violent and misogynous nature of hip hop and other forms of popular culture.
Also, it is the churches’ task to articulate a framework for thinking and speaking about God amidst apparent hopelessness. A question that I believe we must continue to ask is one posed by Howard Thurman in his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman asked, “What does the religion of Jesus have to say to people who have their back against the wall?” In other words, how does Christianity today offer hope to the disinherited among us – the poor, the voiceless, the violated, and the oppressed?
What is this hope of which we speak? In one of his later sermons, "The Meaning of Hope," Martin Luther King, Jr. defined hope as that quality which is "necessary for life."[1]
"The hopeless individual is the dead individual." In King's view hope had a transformative quality that keeps human beings "alive" both spiritually and psychologically.[2] Hope, therefore, is "one of the basic structures of an adequate life."
Furthermore, King asserted that hope was to be viewed as "animated and undergirded by faith and love." In King's mind, if you had hope, you had faith in something. "Hope is generated and animated by love, and is undergirded by faith."[3]
Hope helps us to look ahead with eyes of faith. Hope helps us to see the future with hearts of anticipation. Hope is the refusal to give up “despite overwhelming odds.”
This is what Jeremiah sought to intimate to the Israelites who found themselves mired in apparent hopelessness:
“For surely, I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare (shalom,
wholeness), and not for your harm, plans to give you a future with hope.”
I believe that ours is a future with hope. On numerous occasions, Martin Luther King pointed out that the nature of the hope that many in the church have found in the resurrected Christ is imbedded in the questions posed by the prophet Jeremiah: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healing in the land?” (Jeremiah 8:22)
King intimated that the miracle of faith is that many were able to convert the question marks of the prophet’s lament, into exclamation points as they affirmed their faith and hope in the living and life-giving God. So they could sing the Negro spiritual with hope:
There is a balm in Gilead,
to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead,
To heal the sin-sick soul
Sometimes I feel discouraged
And think my work’s in vain
And then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again![4]
[1] Garth Baker-Fletcher, Somebodyness, 132.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Songs of Zion, 123.
No comments:
Post a Comment